You don't have to go into the weird, wonderful or speculative works to get odd fiction and non-fiction cross overs.
Most of Ion Idriess's works I find hard to classify. This
site says:
Quote:
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He authored more than 50 books over 43 years from 1927 to 1969 - an average of one book every 10 months. These could be loosely described as "Australiana", but that one word can cover a multitude of topics. He wrote books of travel, recollection, biography, history, anthropology and futurology. None of these were fiction, but all were written in a narrative, "story" style. Many of the historical works interwove documented and oral history with cultural research and imagination.
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So they're suggesting it was non-fiction written with imagination? Certainly some were great stories.
I guess most true-crime genre falls into the same thing: fictional accounts of real events ... even if sometimes the real and imagined parts get mixed and matched to suit the story so it becomes impossible to work out which is which. And if you don't know which bits are real, is it really non-fiction?
Then you get the step out from non-fiction where the story is "inspired by" the real events.
Of course, as suggested above, the problem is non-binary: some books are not one or the other, they're both.
And while retailers may have to resolve this dilemma for others (to predict where people are going to look), for my own library I work on how I expect to look for the book.